Dem Votes Won’t Save McCarthy or Any Other GOP Speaker

It’s all coming down to the final showdown in Kevin McCarthy’s seven-year effort to recover the job he thought was his in 2015. We discussed some of these issues yesterday. Given the difficulty of coming up with any plausible explanation of how McCarthy can get 218 votes, you’re now going to hear lots of fantastical proposals about how McCarthy’s failure to get 218 votes might set the stage for a “bipartisan” speakership vote in which some number of Democrats cross the aisle to vote for McCarthy or some “moderate” alternative.

This is not going to happen. For many of you that’s probably obvious. But I thought it might be worth running through the insurmountable obstacles in the way of such an outcome.